hello, tomorrow I want to buy a new hard drive. Atleast 500gb since I have tons of pics, home videos and music. i'm cpu illiterate, so if i get a new hard drive, i need to partion right? does that take long? my current hard drive is 80gb it came with my dell and it also came with windows xp already installed. Since my new drive won't have xp installed is there a simple way I can transfer xp from my dell hard drive to my new hard drive? Through my searches i've read alot of bad stories on external drives, so I should stick to internal? 1 last question, I here people say all the time to back up your hard drive every week. how do you back up your hard drive? If my cpu has currently used 75gb does that mean for me to back up my material I have to have another 80gb of free space on another drive or I have to have 80gb of data disc? does backing up your files take long? thanks

Your new hard drive should come with a utility to transfer your present hd to the new one. I find internal faster. I would partition it out.100gig OS... 200gig pics movies ect. 200gig for backups and must keep files. Opinions on the above will vary. To Backup.click on Start, All programs, Accessories, System tools, Backup Transfering the old to the new will take a while. First backup will also take a while. Creating a restore point is also a good idea. If you are running xp home the restore option must be installed manually. If you take time to read the instructions step by step you should have no problems installing the new hard drive. Opinion...People forget to set the jumpers from master to slave on new hd and the master to slave on the old hard drive after transfer and then slave to master on the new hard drive. Watch your jumpers. By the way...Your old hard drive unless failing is already a good backup of what you have at this time. Hope this is of some help.

I don't think you can transfer your operating system to an external hard drive and make it boot. So if what you want to do is put the OS on the new disk it will have to be internal. I recently got a new hard drive for my Compaq Presario desktop system. I chose an IDE 160 gig hard drive which is the same as my existing hard drive. I had to buy a new IDE cable which had two parellel connectors to replace the old which had one. At first I jumpered it as "cable select" but then my system wouldn't boot. I took out the other drive but couldnot see how to jumper it as cable select. So I ended up making the new drive "slave" using the jumper then it booted. Once I got windows to work I right clicked "my computer" and chose "manage". I then when into disk management where I saw disk 0 and disk 1. Disk1 was the new hard disk which showed as 149 gig of unallocated space. I then right clicked on the unallocated space and chose the "create partition". I made a 8 gig partition and formatted it as FAT32. This was for my Compaq recovery data. I then made a second 141 gig partion and formatted it as NTFS. This was for my main OS, programs, and data. The result was drives L and K in addition to my C and D drives. This configuration is the same as my original disk. I then returned to windows and ran Norton Ghost 12. I ghosted my drive C to drive K and drive D to drive L marking the drive K as "active". I then shut down and changed the new drive to Master and unplugged my original drive. I then started up and was able to boot into windows, the same as before. Compaq Presario SR1720NX Desktop Computer AT&T SBC Yahoo DSL Home Linksys Router/2 computers

if u have a second hard drive slot, just stick it in there and run it in slave mode. you can still partition it, but you wont have to go thru the monkey buisiness of transferring an OS. I would tell you how cheap my computer is, but the nitrogen cooling for the 3.8ghz quad-core does get pretty expensive after a while

thanks to World, Beach, and Yoma for your responses! i really appreciate it. so i think all my questions have been answered! 1 thing i'm still a little confused about, yes i can use my new 500gb as a slave but i want xp on there just incase my master drive messes up. Also will this Norton Ghost program simply copy everything from 1 hard drive to another? or is there a software to do that. Because right now i have a slave drive with 160gb of material on it. it doesn't have windows. So when i buy my new hard drive i want to transfer about 120gb of material from my current slave drive to my new slave drive.. and 1 question i don't know if i'm being clear about since i am cpu illeterate. Right now i have about 4gb of free space. But, i'm trying to backup over 100gb of material...is that possible? i don't understand the backup process and what it's actually backing up. Anyways i'm going to school and work, thanks for all your responses i'll be back in about 14 hours to respond! Good Day